Around the country, Washington Mutual (WM, news, msgs) regularly plays the tough guy with homeowners who fall behind on mortgages. This as foreclosure filings overall rose 60% nationwide in February.
And its involvement in the subprime mess has been tough on stockholders. Since last summer, the company’s shares have lost nearly 80% of their value.
…After CEO Kerry Killinger and other top executives missed all or a big part of their bonus pay last year, Washington Mutual wasted little time taking steps to apparently make sure it won’t happen again — even if the mortgage market and the company remain in the tank.The board decided in February to use different performance yardsticks that could make it look like Killinger and other top executives were doing great jobs — and all but ensure them millions of dollars in bonuses for 2008.Those huge losses piling up because of subprime loans and foreclosures?

…Peckman said the video was shot by Stan Romanek, a Colorado resident who has claimed more than 100 unexplained experiences, including abduction by aliens. In the footage, a weird-looking face pops up several times from the bottom of a window.
The Denver Post quoted Peckman as saying Romanek shot the video in 2003, while he was living in Nebraska, because he was concerned that a “peeping Bingley” was looking into his house. The Post said Romanek was not present for Friday’s news conference, which was attended by about 30 journalists.

One of the world’s rarest otter is receiving help from a Scottish-based wildlife charity.Ken, a male hairy-nosed otter, is the only one of his species to be kept legally in captivity (the exact charges have yet to be filed by the authorities).

Ken, seen here looking for shrimp, expressed his thanks in a statement to the press.

“What with all the spam I’ve had to deal with of late, I really appreciate these oysters. And shrimp. And Sierra Nevadas.
Especially the Sierras.”

TAMPA – A nude maid cleaned up good at a Florida man’s home.
The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office says the maid stole more than $40,000 from a Cheval home despite not wearing any clothes.
The 50-year-old man hired the maid from the Internet on Friday to clean his suburban Tampa home.
Authorities say the woman arrived at the home in a one-piece, light colored dress. She took off the dress and cleaned the house for $100-per-hour.
Sheriff’s office spokeswoman Debbie Carter says the man told deputies he left the maid alone in the bedroom to clean.
When the man’s wife came home from vacation, she discovered $40,000 in jewelry missing from their bedroom.
Police are investigating.

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when the guy explained to his wife what happened…

JERUSALEM (CNN) — Police in Israel are investigating the burning of hundreds of New Testaments in a city near Tel Aviv, an incident that has alarmed advocates of religious freedom.
Investigators plan to review photographs and footage showing “a fairly large” number of New Testaments being torched this month in the city of Or-Yehuda, a police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said Wednesday.
The episode has worried defenders of Israel’s minority population of Messianic Jews, who consider themselves Jewish but believe in the divinity of Jesus, as do Christians. It also has concerned evangelical Christians in North America, Europe and Asia, who visit Israel by the hundreds of thousands.
Calev Myers, an attorney for Messianic Jews in Israel, told CNN he plans to file a formal complaint Thursday with the national police at the request of the United Christian Council in Israel, an umbrella organization for a few dozen Christian organizations outside Israel.

Folks, at the end of the day any particular Bible is just a book; an object made and owned by men. And the Word of God can never be “owned” by men; it is God’s alone. So this veneration, this worship, of the false idol of the Book, something that man can control and manipulate, leads one away from the Word, from the worship of God.
So you can burn my Bible, stick a cross in urine and dung and call it “art” if you’d like; whatever. Hell, with proper planning you can probably even get the government, and by extension me, to fund your little exercise. It’s more a demonstration of mankind’s degradation than an attack on my faith. I won’t get all worked up about it; “vengeance is the Lord’s” as it says. As I’ve noted before I could not worship a god who requires men to do his dirty work like some sort of cosmic mafia Don.

And attack immigrants. The racist, hating Bastards. You knew it would come to this.
In Rome.

Balaclava-clad gangs, some wearing bandanas emblazoned with swastikas, smashed shop windows with iron bars and baseball bats and beat up shopkeepers in a hitherto bohemian neighbourhood of Rome.
Members of the gangs shouted “Get out, bastard foreigners” as they attacked Bengali shopkeepers in the explosion of xenophobic violence.

Italian police began a nationwide round-up of nearly 400 illegal immigrants from the Balkans and North Africa yesterday in the midst of a series of arson attacks on Roma gypsy camps in the suburbs of Naples.
The first step in a drive on crime promised by the new centre-right government of Silvio Berlusconi targeted temporary encampments on the outskirts of cities from Naples to northern Italy. Some 118 people held in the operation were ordered to be expelled immediately for offences ranging from drug dealing and robbery to prostitution.
But in Naples local people have anticipated the new policy, taking the law into their own hands.
This week’s assaults on Roma shanty towns by scores of youths on scooters and motorbikes wielding iron bars and throwing Molotov cocktails were sparked off by the capture of a 17-year-old Roma girl who last weekend entered a flat in Ponticelli and tried to steal a 6-year-old girl. Chased by the mother and neighbours, she had to be rescued by police from being lynched.
The city erupted in fury, with local women leading the marches on the Roma camps to the chant of “Fuori, fuori [Out, out]”. Night after night young men — allegedly acting on the orders of powerful local clans of the Camorra, the Naples Mafia — have set the sites ablaze, blocking attempts by the fire brigade to put out the fires, with exploding gas canisters completing the destruction. The women jeered at the firemen, shouting, “You put these fires out, we start them again”.

My god, it sounds like the horrible anti-immigrant racist scene we see here in the States every single day.
Not.
Remember the Mantra: the Europeans are our Betters. We want them to like us.
Repeat ad infinitum.

ROME — An American tourist from California was killed by a train as he walked on the tracks in a daze after he drank a cappuccino laced with drugs and then was robbed, railway police said Monday.
Frank Phel, 74, of California, died early Friday at the suburban Tiburtina station, police official Giovanni Piccolantonio said. Phel’s hometown was not disclosed.
The suspected robber, a 54-year-old Italian man who was arrested Saturday, had chatted with Phel and his wife before fetching them cappuccinos at a local cafe and then adding a mix of drugs including sleeping pills, Piccolantonio said.
“This man approached these two tourists and earned their trust, and then offered them two cappuccinos with drugs,” Piccolantonio said.

A few weeks ago I bought myself a Webber Smokey Mountain Cooker, aka “The Bullet”, because as much as I love my gas grill sometimes you just want to make some slow-cooked BBQ. I’ve used it for a few things so far, but I really hadn’t done “real” BBQ on it until yesterday, for you see yesterday I did a butt. A wonderful fine tasty pig butt from Costco. The best place in the world to get info on cooking with your Bullet is here, at the Virtual Weber Bullet; it’s an invaluable resource and there are tons of very experienced cooks on the forums to answer your questions and help you on your way. Everything I did was based on their advice and techniques.
So I went to Costco and got my butt. Well, butts, actually, because there are 2 in the cryovac package, for a total weight of about 15 pounds. I was only going to cook one, so using the rough cooking time formula of 1.5-2 hours per pound I was looking at something like a 14 hour cook. Let’s see, I told our friends to come over at 5, so counting back 14 hours that means I need to put this on at…1 am. As in 1 am right after the wine and steaks and scallops and corn on Friday night. Oh boy.
Not surprisingly, me getting up to cook at 1 am Saturday morning didn’t happen, due in large part to the fact that I didn’t go to bed until nearly 12:45. And the wine. And the scotch. But mostly the wine. Mostly.
I did manage to get up at 3:30, though. I opened up the cryovac, re-wrapped the butt I wasn’t going to cook and popped it in the freezer and tied this beauty up with some butchers twine to hold it together for the rub

I was planning on driving over to Geno’s today for lunch, but after all we ate and drank last night I may never eat again.* I just want to lounge here on the couch all day, watching the slave girls dance.
Which I don’t have.
But I do have a loudly snoring LabraDork next to me, so that’s a reasonable substitute, I guess.
*”again” being defined as “until my belly rumbles.”
Which it is doing now…

…continually think exactly the same.
Comforting in a twisted sort of way. My incomparable husband has thoughtfully made me my first caipirinha of the season and I will blissfully sip as I ponder the wondrous mystery of family.

Tell me it’s grillin’ time!
Just garlic salt and coarsely ground fresh pepper.
Oh! Look what I found
Thanks for everything, Boss.
To absent friends!
Sweet baby jeebus, this 8 year old Cab is divine. The tannins have really mellowed out and it has almost a raisiny syrupy flavor and mouth feel. Wow. I wish you could taste it.
Well, not really, because there would be less for me.
Update: Reading through that article and hearing their anecdote about their meal at Windows On The World (sigh) reminds me of my Mondavi story: In August of 1992 my Bride and I took a vacation to San Francisco and Napa, and we took the tour of the Mondavi winery. I asked a few questions and I guess somehow gave the tour guide the impression that I appreciated tasty wine so near the end of the tour the tour guide took us aside and told us to “hang back” after everyone else left. So of course we did. She then took us by ourselves to one of the winery’s tasting rooms and poured for us a glass of the Mondavi Botrytis Sauvignon Blanc dessert wine. Oh. My. God was it divine. I adore these wines, and this was great. It had this raisin/honey/fig unctuousness and crisp acidity to wash all that sugar away. Sigh….talk about a nectar of the gods.

Woohoo! A full 3 day weekend of gastronomic excess!
Tonight as an appetizer we’ve got a pound of fresh sea scallops
marinating in the juice of 2 limes with some EVOO (that’s what all the cool kids call it) and red pepper flakes. Let that marinate for an hour or two in the fridge, flipping occasionally, and then grill those puppies. Yum!
As the veggie we’ll have some grilled corn on the cob
peel back the husk, pull off the silk and then roll the husk back up, sprinkle with a littl water and wrap them in tin foil and grill on the top rack of the grill for, heck, 40 minutes or so.
As the main course I’ve got a couple of big honking porterhouses lying around here somewhere which I’ll…grill.
I haven’t decided on the main wine. My urge is to get out some Mondavi Cabs and raise a toast to The Man himself who passed away last week.
We’ll have to see.
What are y’all eatin’ this weekend?

OPEC chief Abdala El Badri on Thursday said members were unhappy with surging prices he blamed on speculators and a weak US dollar.
“We are not very happy with this increase in oil prices,” said El-Badri during a visit to Ecuador.
“Volatility has nothing to do with the fundamentals. It has nothing to do with world demand,” he said, stressing that a dropping dollar was driving prices higher.

Oh yes, we hateses these higher oil prices, we do!
Gimme a break. You’re loving every second of it, you bastard.

Your granny. HAH! Just as I thought. And she’s working a little money market mojo to pull it off.

If you’re wondering why driving to work has gotten so expensive, you might want to peruse your pension fund’s investments. That’s because speculation by institutional investors pouring money into the commodities market may be largely to blame for spiking oil prices, according to testimony on May 20 before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs.
… The explosion in the number of financial players in the energy markets has occurred particularly in the past two years — also a period of soaring energy prices. That’s why speculators are now under fire from Congress and the public as potential culprits [BusinessWeek.com, 5/15/08].
But in the hearing, Masters distinguished between traditional speculators and what he calls index speculators, or passive investors who enter the commodities markets as a long-term hedge against inflation. Commodities exchanges limit the number of positions an investor can take in the market, but Masters says the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has allowed unlimited speculation in these markets through a loophole. This so-called swaps loophole exempts investment banks like Goldman Sachs (GS) and Merrill Lynch (MER) from reporting requirements and limits on trading positions that are required of other investors. The loophole allows pension funds to enter into a swap agreement with an investment bank, which can then trade unlimited numbers of the contracts in futures markets.

Hmmm. Loopholes and little if any oversight. Sounds eerily like the recipe for a housing crash, all thanks to those sweet faced, gravel voiced queens of speculation, babes of the back room deal ~ grannies.

Or maybe it’s “creeps.” I have to say the only attraction that Obama has for me is the fact that his name is not “Clinton” or “Bush” or “Kennedy”

Ted Kennedy has made clear to confidants that when his time is up, he wants his Senate seat to stay in the family – with his wife, Vicki.
Multiple sources in Massachusetts with close ties to the liberal lion say his wife of 16 years has long been his choice to continue carrying the family flame in the Senate. Kennedy won the seat in 1962; his brother John held it from 1953 to 1960.
“There’s no question that he’d like Vicki to continue in his seat,” said one Massachusetts Democrat with ties to the Camelot clan who spoke to Kennedy recently, before his health crisis.
“She’s smart, and smart politically.”

One of the most depressing signs of the decay of our Republic has been the rise of this dynastic tendency, this emergence of a “ruling class” in lieu of truly competitive elections. Certainly we’ve had such families in the past (the Adams and Roosevelts spring to mind) and certainly local politics have tended towards these sorts of things, but never, it seems to me, have things on the national level been so dominated by so few. The system is stacked against independent candidates, with enormous amounts of money needed for runs, arbitrary election rules created by the two entrenched parties to hinder independents and foster their own, the media turns their noses at independents for the most part, etc. It’s just a sad situation.

…Many eons ago, during the early stages of the Democratic campaign season when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Obama mentioned during a debate that, if elected president, he would be willing to hold direct discussions without preconditions with President Ahmadinejad of Iran and by implication, other heads of hostile nations engaged in the support of terrorism. Senator Clinton saw that statement for what it was, a stupid statement, and hammered Obama for being naïve and inexperienced in foreign policy matters.
Interestingly, Democratic Senator Chris Dodd from the fine state of Connecticut (state motto: “Connecticut – The Forgotten New York City Borough”) also implied that Obama’s willingness to meet with terrorist sponsoring states showed naivete and lack of experience. Now that Dodd is out of the race he’s found a way to spin those charges in a positive light. How excellent is political life?

Police in a Galveston County, Texas, school district have been confiscating dozens of cell phones from students after nude pictures of two junior high girls began circulating, the district superintendent said.
“Those students forwarded the images and the circle opened up and got wider and wider,” Superintendent Jon Whittemore said Tuesday.
He said that it all started when two Santa Fe Junior High School students took nude photos of themselves and sent them to their boyfriends. The boyfriends forwarded the photos to others, who in turn forwarded them again, he said.

The Energy Information Administration announced that crude inventory levels for the week ended May 17 fell 5.32 million barrels, marking the first decline after four consecutive weeks of inventory builds. Analyst expected stockpiles to increase by 300,000 barrels.
As a result, crude oil prices spiked from the unchanged mark to a gain of 2.4% at $132.08 per barrel, marking an all-time high. Crude prices are up 16% in May, the largest monthly percent advance in nearly four years.

A group of senators called on President Bush on Thursday to halt billions of dollars in sophisticated arms sales to Saudi Arabia and several other Gulf oil producers unless they agree to pump more petroleum, reflecting growing frustration in Congress over soaring energy costs.
Separately, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that Bush should stop putting 70,000 barrels of oil a day into the government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, saying the oil would be better left in the market place to help lower prices. The Energy Department recently announced it is extending oil shipments into the reserve, which holds 700 million barrels, through the end of the year.

(And Bush caved to the reserve pressure.)
Holy macanoni, Nancy! It’s GREAT to know you’re lookin’ out for us. No ANWAR, no shale, no Gulf, no weapons for them A-rabs. ( Let all that filthy lucre prop up the…say…Russian or Chinese military machines, with schmaybe a little Kim Jong action on the side. There are hungry faces in NoKo, after all. I mean, who can resist them? Not any Democrat I know!) and now no spare capacity.
So, sure, why not? We’re one big happy world! And spreading the wealth is a centerpiece of Democratic strateegery, isn’t it? So grab yourself a cold kumba rumba cuba libre and follow the bouncing ball!
For the math impaired Congressionals busy pounding their solar calculators, work this one (Careful now. It’s a WORD problem): If you have a BIG salt cavern filled to the drippy barrel brim with gooey fruits of filthy Arab gushers and then take away in (one week) fivepointthreetwomillionbarrels…HOW many days at seventythousandbarrelsperday does it take to make that up? If you really want to be Einstein-like (unless you’re anti-Jewish) throw in the variables that make math so fun ~ war, pestilence, Paris Hilton (you know, stuff we can’t control).
Granted, that 5.32M was stockpile drawdown vice the petroleum reserves, but the exercise is useful in pointing out how rapidly we deplete resources when the mood takes us. Gas may be $4 a gallon, but SOMEBODY somewhere’s been doing some driving. And woof! There’s goes another couple bucks per barrel because some trader somewhere is thinking the exact. Same. Thing.
When you’re talking millions of barrels down in a ‘surprise’, that 70K won’t be missed.
Sitting in a gas line for two hours on an odd day sucks, my friends. And that was only a couple years ago, not the ’70’s. I can’t wait ’til the rest of the country gets to share our pain.
And thanks, Nance! Have a great summer.

American Airlines to cut capacity, charge for bags
…The company plans to charge $15 for many passengers’ first checked bag starting in mid-June, an unprecedented move by a major U.S. airline as it tries to claw back more of its extra fuel costs. Rivals are considering following suit.

Fifteen bucks a pop and they’ll STILL lose them. Plus, I cannot wait to see what passes for “carry-on” now.
Can you sue if somebody drops a 60 lb duffel bag on your grape that they were trying to stuff into the overhead?